David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, to talk politics, journalism in Syracuse

Add to the list of questions Central New Yorkers might want to ask The New Yorker editor David Remnick next month -- Did the satirical Obama cartoon succeed or fail? Who exactly is that guy in the monocle and top hat? Does John Updike need a lot of editing? -- one more:

OK, so the chances of the magazine putting its name behind the Independent or Libertarian candidates are probably slim. (The New Yorker endorsed Democrat Sen. John Kerry in 2004.)

"I thought it was a change worth making ... because I thought that not doing it seemed somehow delicate and decorous," Remnick, 49, said. "We have opinions about a lot of other things. Why not the most important thing?"

Remnick, who in 1998 became the fifth editor of The New Yorker, on Oct. 14 will kick off the 14th season of the Rosamond Gifford Lecture Series, a fundraiser that benefits the Onondaga County Public Library. He'll be followed by Carl Hiaasen (Nov. 11), Ann Patchett (Dec. 10), Sarah Vowell (Feb. 24), Marjane Satrapi (March 31), Neil deGrasse Tyson (April 21) and Ishmael Beah (May 19).

He'll be introduced on a civic center stage by Donald Newhouse, who with brother S.I. Newhouse Jr., runs Advance Publications (which owns The Post-Standard) and Conde Nast (which owns The New Yorker).

Remnick wrote for the Washington Post for 10 years before he joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1992. He said his talk in Syracuse will focus on politics and the precarious state of print journalism.

"I spent 10 years in newspapers and, needless to say, I have a lot of friends, especially at The Washington Post, but also the Times and smaller papers, and it's almost as scary to be there as it is to be at AIG or Lehman. It's very rough. And (newspapers) are living in this really hard transformational time, in which this new invention has paradoxically thrown all of this into flux. All of this that you and I value, which is to say journalism of the best kind. I think it's going to take time to wash out."